Concert: The Little Match Girl
David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion is a quiet yet unsparing meditation on Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Little Match Girl. In Lang’s interpretation, the fairy tale is brought into our own time and transformed into a modern passion—not about redemption through sacrifice, but about suffering born of the surrounding world’s silence.
The music moves through an ascetic landscape of voices, percussion, and pauses. Every sound carries traces of cold, waiting, and repetition. Like the girl’s matches, the music flares briefly—fragile, fleeting, and vanishing. What is heard is as important as what is withheld.
Performed in English, The Little Match Girl Passion is not addressed to children, but to us as adults—those who are able to help, yet do not always do so. In the encounter between text and music, the girl’s loneliness becomes a mirror: humanity is not measured in compassion, but in action. When the work fades away, there is no consolation—only the question of what it means to see, and still walk on.
With this production, the Swedish Chamber Choir expands and challenges the traditional concert format, weaving song together with movement and staged expression, under the direction of the choir’s conductor and artistic director Kim Simon Phipps, in collaboration with choreographer Aloun Marchal. The choir also broadens its audience through a short, exciting, and intense tour to exceptionally fine concert halls in the Netherlands and Belgium.
In addition to The Little Match Girl Passion, the choir will perform Bo Holten’s Regn og rusk og rosenbusk, also set to a text by H.C. Andersen. In this virtuosic work for 16 voices, opposing views of existence—optimistic light and pessimistic darkness—compete with one another. The themes of light and darkness, harmony and dissonance, are further reflected in Ingvar Lidholm’s starkly contrasting De profundis and in Sven-David Sandström’s intensely expressive version of Henry Purcell’s Hear My Prayer, O Lord.
1 March 2026 6 pm – Kronhuset, Gothenburg
13 March 2026 8 pm – St Baafskerk (St. Bavo’s Church), Aardenburg, the Netherlands
14 March 2026 8 pm – Die Singel, Antwerpen, Belgium
15 March 2026 3 pm – De Spil, Roeselare, Belgium
Image: Story of Andersen, https://storyofandersen.dk